Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“Make sure you peel as much of the yuck off as possible,” she said. “I hate the yuck.”

“I hate the yuck, too,” I said, and held a jeweled segment over her mouth. Her lips spread and her tongue slid forward. It had been ages since I’d fed anyone. It was excellent the way, when I held the crescent of orange there, poised above her blue lips, her mouth just opened. I dangled another piece and watched her mouth open like a little starveling bird’s and then I pulled the piece away and watched her mouth close. Then I gave it to her.

“You don’t have a match, do you?” I put a cigarette in my mouth. “A pyro like yourself.”

“I’d love a smoke.”

“I bet you would. Why do you burn yourself?”

“My doctor’s theory is it puts the pain in a place I can find it. On the outside.”

“I know exactly what he means. I thought making movies was going to be that way. Now I’d just rather be crucified.”

“I don’t like your mind.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not here for a pedicure.”

“Untie me,” she whispered.

“No can do,” I said.

“Please.”

“Can’t.”

“We’ll just smoke that cig and then you can buckle me right back up.”

“I don’t have any matches.”

She smiled. “I do.”

She told me to lift the table lamp and underneath it I found a cache of contraband matches. Each individual match had been ripped from the book and mustered in a neat, soldierly line, and the strip of striking was there, too, the whole kit flat enough to hide beneath the green felt base.

“Great, but I’ll just hold the cig to your lips. I’m going to leave you strapped in for now.”

We worked the cig down to a nub, fanning the smoke out the window, and then she yanked at the sides of her gown. A couple of the snaps popped open, and she pulled aside the paper. It made a rustling like the thin parchment pages of a Bible.

“This was the first time, after an audition for the Albany Ballet,” she said, using her finger to trace a faint cicatrix the size of a postage stamp. “I wanted a sharp blade, I just had the idea. I had a disposable razor for shaving my legs, so I put that in my mouth. I bit down on it real hard, trying to crack the plastic so I could get the blade free. But I couldn’t get it. It wouldn’t come out. I was so frustrated. I started crying. I lit a cigarette. I had no idea what that hand with the cigarette would do — it was like it was somebody else’s.

“Sometimes, like this, I’m just tense,” she said, pointing out an ellipsis of brown dots down the length of her belly, marks the size of moles she’d made by extinguishing stick matches against her skin. All along her body, a palimpsest of older lesions darkened beneath the rawer, more recent burns. Her arms were crosshatched with brands she’d seared into her skin with a coat hanger heated over a gas stove.

“Can I touch?” I asked.

She nodded.

I put my finger against a dark, hard burl on her outer thigh, an elevated lump as smooth as a chestnut. I ran the flat of my hand over her hip and down her leg. Whatever I touched prompted a story, some account: auditions, classes, Tuesday nights, phone calls, weddings. I’d been horny, but now I felt detached. This display of her body wasn’t sexy, the way a tour of a battlefield isn’t bloody.

In the p-hosp, of course, it was seriously against the rules to touch another patient, and being under Bob’s constant surveillance didn’t make it easy for us. In line at the cafeteria I’d palm my food tray with one hand and feel her solid balletic rump with the other. Or I’d play footsie with her under the table at Friday-night bingo. Or I’d grope her up in the little gymnasium where, for RT, we played some of the sorriest games of volleyball you can imagine. In the typical draft that goes on against the fence at school, you know who the athletes are, who the sissies are, who to crib from in a history exam and avoid on the kickball team, but up on psych choosing a squad of decent players was primarily a pharmacological matter, something where, really, you wanted to consult the DSM-IV before you made your first selection. Choosing an appropriate sexual partner in a mental hospital was probably supposed to work along similar lines. You needed records!

With her malady, the ballerina wasn’t really into fooling around, but I hoped her new medication, Manerix, which was supposed to dampen some of her desire to burn herself, might also lead by inverse ratio to an upsurge in her passion for old-fashioned sex. After a week, two weeks, I was getting frustrated. Most of the contact we made, skin to skin, was glanc-ing and accidental, hardly more than what passes acceptably between strangers on the street. She had this terrific body, so looking and fantasizing was fine — for a while. But of course about this time I discovered that I couldn’t whack off. My medication was giving me erectile hassles, plus Bob outside my open door didn’t help. In anticipation of the day when the ballerina’s Manerix would kick in I started pitching my cocktail of bupropion and lithium and clonazepam out the window.

But the ballerina made such great progress on her new meds that by the end of February her p-doc wanted her to practice sleeping through the night without restraints. After dinner we’d sit outside, on the patio, and watch the sun go down, knowing she was about to be released. And one morning, sure enough, I saw her dragging a wicker basket and a pillowcase full of clothes to the nurses’ station. Departures on the psych ward were a big deal. People always swore they’d come back and visit but they never did. By the time you were a ward veteran like myself a little bit of your hope left with them and never fully returned. I expected I’d never see her again. She was cured, and that was tantamount to being gone, gone off to reside in some unfamiliar land. Her grandparents met her in the lounge with their hopeless, past-tense faces and their old leafy clothes; standing beside them in a gauzy spring dress, the ballerina seemed a mere puff of self, passing like a spirit out of their heavy Old World sadness, whatever it was about. She told me that as soon as I managed to wrangle my first pass she wanted to see me. She used a red felt pen to write her name and number across the hem of my gown, and we shook hands, but after she was gone and I took up my station on the sofa, I felt certain I wouldn’t rise again until some angel came by and blew a trumpet.

It was maybe a couple weeks later, and I was no longer on Maximum Observation. Bob was gone and I was on my own. My window was open and little things stirred as they had in my childhood, so that the clothes scattered on the floor were once again the bodies of dead men. When I was a boy, my father and his six brothers seined for salmon out of Ilwaco, Washington, and every couple years one or another of them would wash up in the frog water around Chehalis Slough, drowned. The funerals seemed to last days, weeks, even months, as the remaining brothers gathered nightly in the Riptide bar and stared drunkenly into each other’s eyes like dazed, speechless toads. Left at home, sleepless and alone — I have a mother somewhere, but I never knew her — I imagined that each shirt on the floor was a dead uncle and I could not leave the tipsy life raft of my bed, waiting out those long nights when the ocean fog was cool and full of premonitions and the beacon at the end of the breakwater threw green shadows against the walls of my room. Now I drew the blanket over my head. “Our Father who art in heaven. . etc. . etc. . now and at the hour of our death amen!” When the coffin thing didn’t put me to sleep I peeked over the satiny selvage of my blanket and stared at the ceiling and listened to the tedious complaints of patients as they wept into the pay phone across the hall: (8:02) . . My parents had a bad marriage, then divorced and married worse people. . (8:07) . . I’ll show you what’s the matter with me. Then I get my razor. I cut down sharp and quick. I scream and go out onto the court and bleed all over. . (8:47) . . It’s hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time. .